REQUEST FOR DISCUSSION (RFD)
unmoderated group comp.infosystems.harvest
Summary: The Harvest information discovery and access system.
Proposed by: Michael Schwartz <schwartz@cs.colorado.edu>
Technical Contact: Duane Wessels <wessels@cs.colorado.edu>
This is the second Request For Discussion concerning the creation of a
new group called comp.infosystems.harvest. This is not a call for
votes. If an agreement about the new group is reached within a
discussion period lasting another two weeks, this RFD will be followed
with a formal Call For Votes. The CFV will be posted to the same
newsgroups and mail lists as this RFD, namely:
news.announce.newgroups, news.groups,
comp.infosystems.gopher, comp.infosystems.www.misc,
comp.infosystems.www.providers, comp.infosystems.www.users,
www-announce@mail.w3.org, www-proxy@mail.w3.org
There have been no changes from the original RFD.
Discussion of this proposal should take place in news.groups.
BACKGROUND
Harvest is an integrated set of customizable tools to gather,
extract, organize, search, cache, and replicate relevant
information across the Internet. More information is available at
http://harvest.cs.colorado.edu/.
RATIONALE
At present we have one mailing list for new release announcements,
and another mailing list for users to ask the Harvest team
technical questions. We are getting an increasingly frequent
stream of requests for a forum where users can communicate among
themselves. Additionally, Harvest related messages have been
appearing in various comp.infosystems.www.* newsgroups where they
may be inappropriate.
We believe there is now a sufficiently large user base to warrant a
separate group. As an indication, at present there are Harvest
servers installed at hundreds of sites worldwide, with new servers
being created and registered increasingly often. Also, there are
Harvest users at over 10,000 sites in 90 countries.
CHARTER
The proposed newsgroup is intended as a place for users of the
Harvest software to help each other and exchange ideas. The
Harvest development team will monitor the group and reply to
technical and other appropriate messages.
Harvest has a number of software components: a gatherer/content
extractor, a broker/indexer, a cache, and a replicator. The
proposed newsgroup will be an appropriate place to discuss each of
these subsystems.
Example topics may include:
- How to customize a broker.
- Porting Harvest to an unsupported platform.
- Organizing a large replication group.
- Suggestions for features and improvements.
PROCEDURE
To make comments about this RFD, please use the "followup" command,
which will post your response to the "news.groups" newsgroup. A
call for votes (CFV) will be issued approximately two weeks after
this RFD. Please do not post votes at this time. When the CFV is
posted, there will be instructions on how to mail your votes to the
independent vote counter.